Freud and Freud

ONE HUNDRED YEARS AFTER FREUD'S BIRTH PSYCHOANALYSIS IS IN FULL bloom, enjoying ample credit for its achievements. The ill look at it as their last hope; doctors are making good money; the public, in general, approves of it. However, it is very probable that in a hundred years more the doctors of the future will not receive any benefit at all from psychoanalysis.

Just as science is experimentation, it happens that all science inevitably has a transitory character. Of course, it must be said, experience is never lost. But when the incessant advances of this same science change it, whatever it might be, its method is replaced by another one which has resulted from new experience. We will see, then, the blotting out of an antiquated and inefficient method which has brought relief and money to one part of humanity.

And if scientific experience is objectionable, so will its experimenter be. It could happen that at the next centenary of the birth of Freud his method will seem anachronistic, that surprising untruths will be found, even flagrant fraud. There might even be something more serious. Nineteen fifty-six saw the open sesame to the doors of the subconscious, but in 2056 this method will be of hardly any interest at all, let alone serious or scientific interest.

In this way the artifices of psychoanalysis will be laid bare; then, with this scrap placed to one side, we would be able to see Freud the great artist in all his magnitude. Let us make ourselves understood. I do not want to say that Freud is going to remain as an outstanding author of works of fiction, not that interest in him will, within a hundred years, center on his elevated literary style. Like a palliative, this always is said in reference to a pseudo-scientist, and we already know that Freud was a scientist in the strictest sense of the term. On the contrary, it is a matter of something infinitely more valuable and profound. Freud is a great artist insofar as he is an interpreter of the obscure psychic life of man. His powerful fantasy, which situates him among the great artists of all times, leads him, with the power of a wizard, to the construction of a world that is just as implacably logical as it is implacably illogical. As if Freud had seen himself constrained by the psychic material with which he operated to recover his findings with the fabulous powder extracted from this very material. Who does not recall, for example, his celebrated interpretation of dreams? If a dream is already amazing in itself, the interpretation which Freud gives of it will be even more amazing. That is, to the extent that we continue reading the Freudian interpretation of this or that dream, at the same time that Freud uncovers the mechanism of oneiric life, another dream unfolds under our gaze, that is, the interpretation of the dream he is studying. And this interpretation, by virtue of having been presented like a dream, demands to be interpreted in its turn. Here, as happens in art, the statue is more finished and complete than the model. But let us let Freud himself interpret the dream of a woman married to a police officer:

You will remember here without effort the symbols used. The masculine genital organs are represented by the meeting of three people and the feminine by a landscape composed of a chapel, a mountain, and a forest. The stairs that give access to the church constitute a symbol of the sexual act, and that which in the dream appears like a mountain carries in Anatomy the same name: Mound of Venus.²

This is logical; it is scientific; it is serious. We should note that Freud did not manage to decipher dreams until after he developed a rigorous method. Nevertheless...